Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 40, No. 4, April 1977
Target — Mike Shayne
by Brett Halliday
(ghost written by Robert Terrall)
Everybody involved in the criminal libel suit wants missing witness Myra Rainey, including the Miami redhead. But the going doesn’t get really rough until Myra’s roommate is murdered in her home.
I
Shayne had just pulled his Buick to a stop in front of the old pine mansion when the shots blasted the quiet of deepening twilight on the palm arcaded street. There were two of them, a couple of seconds apart, followed by a wildly discordant chorus of birdlife already nested in for the night to come.
But no human sounds followed their shattering impact. No shouts, no screams, no moans.
The detective’s right hand slipped inside his jacket to grip the butt of the big Colt .45 in his shoulder rig. He sat there, waiting, as the second hand on the dashboard clock made two full circuits of the illuminated dial.
Still nothing.
He was in the very oldest part of Miami, where fine antiquated houses were all but masked from the street by the jungle growth of tropical foliage that had grown up in the near-century since they were built. But there were houses, however widely separated, in Coconut Grove, and surely, he thought, there should be some audible or visible reaction to the twin detonations that had shattered the twilight quiet.
But there was none he could hear or see. Even the birds ceased their clatter when the shots’ echoes faded and were still.
Mike Shayne got out of his car and closed the door silently behind him! With his right hand hovering close to the heavy automatic, he crossed the street slowly and walked up a brief gravel driveway, largely overgrown with grass that served to muffle his footfalls.
It led past the large house on his right, through whose windows no light glowed, widened into a turnaround parking area at the rear of the dwelling, went on some forty feet to a former coachhouse-garage that had been converted into a small out-residence. There lived Cathy Whiting, the young woman he had driven out to see.
Two cars were side by side in the parking area — a three-year-old Pinto and a grey Mercedes that looked new. The redhead halted his progress long enough to lay a hand on the radiators of both vehicles. They were both warm, but not unreasonably so for the temperature, which lingered in the low seventies.
The redheaded detective judged that the shots had come from the small separate dwelling that was his destination. He had set up the interview via telephone from his office that afternoon, after considerable research had rewarded him with the knowledge that Cathy Whiting was the apartment mate of Myra Rainey, the young woman whose whereabouts Shayne was seeking.
“I don’t know what I can tell you,” Cathy Whiting had said over her office phone, “but come on out about seven if you think it might help you. I’m worried about Myra, too.”
So here Shayne was, on the dot, to be greeted by the sounds of gunfire. He studied the smaller house. Somewhere, in its interior, a dim light glowed — too dim to create interior visibility through the windows. The front door was shut.
Shayne drew his automatic and put thumb to the safety catch before crossing the turnaround area. The unnatural stillness, following the double eruption of the shots, caused the hackles at the nape of his neck to stiffen. Then, silent as a large redheaded cat, the detective slid swiftly toward the rail-less porch that fronted the small dwelling.
Taking a deep breath, he punched the doorbell.
The twilight stillness was again shattered without warning after a brief period of silence. A window beside the door was smashed abruptly and the barrel of a gun was thrust through it, pointed at the detective and fired twice more.
The flashes all but blinded him, the shots themselves were deafening at such close range that he could feel the draft created by the bullets themselves. Had not the infinitesimal time-gap between the breaking of the window pane and the shots been sufficient for Mike Shayne to plunge face downward on the porch floor, he would have had his head blown off.
He lay prone, feigning death or unconsciousness, then inched himself over with infinite care to cover the front door should his would-be assassin emerge. By the time he was sitting upright, a door slammed at the rear of the little house and, casting caution aside, Shayne scrambled to his feet and circled the out-dwelling, automatic at the ready...
...only to stumble into, a barbecue pit in the back yard that caused him to fall to his hands and knees.
This time, the door slam sounded from the front of the house, followed by the thud of sprinting footsteps on the gravel of the parking area. Realizing he had been effectively flummoxed, the redhead completed his circuit of the little house in pursuit.
A car motor roared to life as he raced past a brick chimney. By the time he regained a view of the lot, the Mercedes was taking the turn into the driveway on two wheels with rubber in screaming protest.
Mike Shayne did not send a bullet after it. The chance of scoring a tire-hit on a receding object in motion in that dim light was about one in two million. He went on around to the front door, which now hung open, and walked in.
Cathy Whiting — Shayne judged it was she by the C.W. monogram on the breast pocket of the lavender sports shirt which contrasted pleasantly, even in the semi-gloom of the house interior, with her chrome yellow shorts — lay on her back in the little living room. What had been her face was a pudding of blood and bone and brains and hair and shredded flesh.
From a framed photograph on a table beside the small sofa, Cathy Whiting had been a very attractive young woman. In the picture, she stood with an arm around an exceedingly comely brunette against an outdoor background. The brunette Shayne recognized from other photographs he had seen as Myra Rainey.
With a sigh, he pulled out a handkerchief after holstering his handgun, picked up the telephone and dialed Homicide. Then he got out of there and walked back to his car through the near-night.
As he did so, he received an answer to one factor that had especially puzzled him — the lack of any reaction to the sounds of the shots, apart from the birds in the trees. The over-and-undergrowth of tropical vegetation in this oldest part of the city was so dense that it must have blanketed the detonations.
The redhead had heard the shots because he was in front of the old house, with a clear acoustical alley. But across the street was a lot, vacant except for the all-encroaching palms and palmettoes.
Mike Shayne did not linger to greet the police, although he heard the faint whine of a siren as he drove eastward toward South Bayshore Drive. He had no desire to be put through even a cursory examination at this point in a case where things were evidently hotting up.
The redhead had been called into it less than twenty-four hours earlier, although the case itself was almost a year old. Only within the span of the last two days, however, had it erupted into possible criminal action, with the disappearance, voluntary or compulsory, of Myra Rainey.
II
Tim Rourke looking as usual like a famine victim, awaited the detective in their regular rear booth at The Beef House. As Shayne took the seat opposite, the star reporter for the Miami Daily News looked up from his half-empty boilermaker with an expression that combined hope with acceptance of the worst.
“Well...?” he said.
“Well... nothing.”